Archive for August, 2013

During my May/June of 2013 author-visit stay in Seoul, Korea, one of the highlights was my interview with KBS’s international news anchor June Chang. She produced a series of interviews as part of the embassy’s oral history programming, “America and Me,” for the observance of the 60th anniversary of the Armistice Agreement of the Korean War. My portion of the interviews, 3-minutes long, has been posted to the embassy’s website and also on YouTube. I plan to go into the embassy website and view interviews of other Korean War survivors, especially that of Gen. Baek Sun-yop, who played an absolutely pivotal role during the war. In the “Korean War” section of my website, I posted pictures of a meeting of him and Michael (my husband and director of Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.) Here’s the link to the interview.

*The “America and Me” video, a Korean War oral history program by the American Embassy in Seoul, includes an interview of Maija Rhee Devine. It has been uploaded on YouTube and posted to the US Embassy website. It’s a little over three minutes long: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-6-Qm-MtEg

I am also adding a link to my Korea Times article, published on 7/27, again as part of the English language newspaper’s remembrance of the Armistice Agreement.

I know I have this info. on the home page of this website, but I wanted to add my feeling about these two posts. These stories are specific to the Korean War but the emotion of grief over lost and maimed lives, fury of many depths and reasons for them, and the joy of newly-formed bonding and forgiveness, given and taken–or the despair of it neither given nor taken–are common to all wars. I’d like to see these messages reach all those whose souls have been touched by wars. I feel extremely blessed to have been given the opportunity to participate in these programs. Thank you, war veterans and their families!

7/30, I went into www.GoodReads.com and I found 9 reviews that gave 5-star rating to The Voices of Heaven! 6 gave 4-stars and 3 gave 3 stars. There are 20 pages of people who marked the book as their “to-read.”